A Good and Happy Child (18 page)

I drank it down. She rose from the bed. Our business was done.

“Mom?”

“Yes, honey?”

“Will you pull the shades when you go?”

She went to the window and gave both drapes a yank. They slid into place across the moonlit window and the room went dark.

“Okay?” her voice said in the blackness.

As her footsteps faded, creaking down our stairs, I realized how accustomed I had grown to the hospital. The place never fully got dark. Banks of fluorescent lights were bolted in every possible location. Even
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after lights-out, a rim of cold fluorescent sunshine penetrated through the crack under the door; and the rattle of laundry carts and phones ringing never quite ceased. Here, I lay in my own tomb of blackness and silence. The sheets covered me. I closed my eyes, anticipating the nauseous onset of the drugs. Instead I heard a rustling in the corner of my room. I sat bolt upright, squinting into the darkness, expecting to make out the shape of a mouse chewing paper. But the noise shifted eerily. The papery crinkling I heard mutated into the rustling of leaves, the sound broadening until I thought I heard, and felt, currents of cold air blowing in an open sky. Were my senses playing tricks on me? Another sound wove into the others:
George,
it said.
George.
I froze, questioning: Had I really heard that? Then it came swiftly, growing in volume like an approaching missile:
George George George George.
I threw myself on the bed again and only caught a glimpse, as my head hit the pillow, of the walls of my room falling away to reveal a deep blue night sky; cold stars; freezing air pouring in over me. I clenched the blankets around my chin and shivered violently. Now it surrounded me:
George,
George.
My own name circled the bed like a fringe of grubby fingers, prodding and poking for an opening. I squeezed my eyes tight.
No,
I kept repeating, inside my head, hoping I could resist. I saw a point of hot white light. For once I was glad to see it. It built and built until the great wave of medication reared up—sickening me, dampening my upper lip with sweat—and crashed over me, sweeping away stars, voices, fingers. My grip on the covers loosened. My mind buzzed, numb again. I slept.

r r r

I returned to Julius Patchett Middle School with a new schedule. Walking home by myself and passing the afternoon unsupervised was now forbidden. Two days a week—Tuesdays and Fridays—I was to have a regular therapy session with Richard. Two days a week—Mondays a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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and Wednesdays—for at least two weeks, I was to return to the clinic for testing. A psychologist named Rachel was to give me a series of tests. On the off day, Thursday, Clarissa had agreed to drive me home, or to Tom Harris’s, after dropping her daughter Celia off at band.

And so I moved back into ordinary life. I was back on the rails. Or, thinking about it another way—maybe I had never been off the rails. On medication, my thinking, my reactions, were slower: none of the bursting impulses to share a quirky sentiment; none of the bubbly need for attention in the halls. I spoke slowly and clearly to head off the Thorazine stammers. I raised my hand once per class. I went from daily scoldings about messy handwriting to tidy homework. I watched more television. TV and Thorazine, I discovered, were a classic combination—and as an added bonus, when I ate lunch with the hicks, we had all seen the same shows. Ironically, I had become precisely the type of student teachers loved. Orderly. No extra trouble. I received secret pats on the back, private smiles of fatigued gratitude.
Thank
you for making my day a little easier.
Dean, Byrd, and Toby ignored me. It was an experiment in personality physics: I no longer created friction. This was an excellent way to get by.

That Thursday, the afternoon schoolyard was nippy. I stood outside in a windbreaker and jeans, my fingers white and chilled gripping the handle of the French horn case. The wind blew; the metal stays rattled on the flagpole. A familiar figure appeared in the corner of my eye. She hailed me, then slowly made her way toward me in her boots and shaggy blue dress. The Bing family vehicle—a massive and muddy four-wheel-drive GMC—hulked in the parking lot.

“Well,” said Clarissa. “Ready for the twelve tasks?”

The GMC rumbled. The French horn lay on my lap.

“And how are you?”

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I knew she meant more by this than a greeting.

“Better.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t have those problems anymore.”

“Went away, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Just like that?”

“They give me drugs now.”

She grunted. “Psychiatric medication,” she lectured in her quavering voice, as she tugged the wheel of the enormous vehicle around a turn, “is intended to suppress the unwanted symptoms of your condition. Not cure it. And there’s more to what happened on Halloween than your behavior—you can’t just put a cork in it. There’s the spiritual side. Your father died—what’s an eleven-year-old supposed to make of that? There’s the emotional side. How are you coping? I don’t suppose the doctors in Charlottesville talked about any of this.”

I shook my head.

“No,” she snorted. “Ever hear the expression, ‘If you’re holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail’?”

I shook my head, puzzled. “Who’s holding a hammer?”

“Your doctor. It’s called a prescription pad.” She sighed. “How do you like the medication?”

“I
hate
it.”

“It was a trick question,” she said. “Nobody
likes
Thorazine.”

The GMC growled out of the intersection near our church—the Jubal Early Memorial Episcopal Church, hewn in rough stone—

where my father had been a lay reader. I had not been inside since he died.

Rain was falling now, and droplets pelted the windshield. The sky had gone heavy gray.

“Is there something wrong with the fact that I feel better?” I said.

“I’m
supposed
to feel better—right?”

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“You’re supposed to feel how you feel. If you feel better, fine. If you don’t, there’s more work to do.”

“More work,” I reflected. “Like cleaning up Tom Harris’s house. Only it’s my house. My brain.”

“Don’t sell your brain short,” Clarissa snorted. “Wait till you see this place.”

n o t e b o o k 1 0

Pure Sense

The drive to Tom Harris’s farm flew past in a roar, with the GMC

spitting gravel on Route 17. We passed the truck stop with rows of eighteen-wheelers that had been parked, or propped on jacks like stilts. We passed the combination fireworks store and souvenir shop hunkered at the bottom of a creek dell, with a yard full of concrete swans and lawn jockeys and a billboard bearing a Confederate flag and the boast LARGEST RATTLESNAKE IN THE SOUTH. (Once I forced my mother to stop there to buy Snap ’n’ Pops; the snake
was
pretty big, a coiled wet sack in a filthy aquarium.) We passed the Howard Johnson, a deserted body shop, a drive-in movie theater, the latter a forlorn whitewashed structure like one wall of a temple ruin.

The landmarks fell away, and we came to the pastured landscape of Stoneland County. Rolling fields spread out on either side of the highway, punctuated by limestone slabs rising from the turf like the backs of dolphins. Tin-roofed barns built of weathered planks dotted the fields. A clay-bottomed creek split one pasture in a jagged red line. Billboards advertised the few area tourist attractions, like the caverns and the threadbare zoo off Exit 9.

At last a left turn brought us to a gravel drive. Ahead of us, forest crawled down from the hills. After a twist or two, a house came into
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view. I don’t know what kind of a place I had expected Tom Harris to live in—maybe a log cabin to match his Abe Lincoln appearance—but his real home was ominous and strange beyond my expectations. The gravel drive curved around the perimeter of a meadow, under a line of scrubby cedars, and along a barbed-wire fence. Atop the hill, a grove of mulberry and cedar trees hovered like a cloud bank, the leaves casting blue shadows. As we approached, what appeared to be a manycornered house with various tin and copper roofs turned out to be several structures: a long central building of brownish ivy-eaten brick with a great paneled window; and two squat outbuildings, walls and chimneys crumbling and only intermittently restored with patches of jarringly pristine mortar. The tools for repair—hoes, trowels, and wheelbarrow—were lying nearby in the grass, as if they had been abruptly dropped mid-job. Finally, away on the left, a smokehouse lurked in the weeds: a tiny wood shack, no larger than a toolshed or a large outhouse, with an open, slanted roof. Its upper quarter had been blackened by years of use, and I could almost see greasy smoke lapping at the paint in black curls.

Clarissa parked the car behind Tom Harris’s tiny Mazda coupe. Another car was parked under the boughs of the scruffy mulberry: a cream-colored Mercedes. The air was still, close, and fragrant with pine needles and a mash of wet leaves and mud.

Clarissa held the door for me, explaining, as she led me to the house, that it had been restored from an eighteenth-century farmstead—the sheds and shacks visible from the drive had been slaves’

quarters—and the current kitchen had once been a group of storerooms where fruits were dried for winter consumption. I made my way into a house that seemed to be built on a slant, and for a burrowing mouse: the kitchen, into which the side porch entered, was split into three inconveniently tiny rooms. Despite its historical interest, the place carried the present-day whiff of bachelorhood: pots sat soaking in the sink;
Time
magazines, telephone bills, and Pepperidge Farm cookie wrappers were piled up on a little table; the linoleum looked fuzzy and distinctly unmopped. As the living room came into view, there came
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also the musty but comfortable odor of books, old sofas, and mothballs, reminiscent of the few but precious times my father, in a genial mood, had allowed me to stay in his study while he worked. I would burrow in his graduate-school couch and doze, and wait for him to shake me gently awake for supper.

“George!”

Tom Harris hailed me from an armchair. His face had regained its former color, and his voice its full power, though his eyes seemed shadowed and more deeply set, as if they, at least, had not forgotten the worries of his hospital stay. His leg, encased in a cast, rested on an ottoman.

“I’m in one piece again,” he said, “thanks to the brilliant surgeons of the A. P. Hill Hospital.” He winked at his friends. “I may walk with a slight limp . . . if I do walk again . . . because one leg will be four inches shorter than the other . . .”

Clarissa snorted with laughter.

“. . . but that was an arithmetical error. Nothing to do with medicine. Not my doctor’s fault.”

“What anesthesia did they give you, Tom?” said another voice: Uncle Freddie’s, explaining the presence of the Mercedes. He reclined in a beat-up antique chair—its upholstery once a plush yellow velvet, but now a scuffed fabric reminiscent of my worn-out stuffed animal toys—flipping pages in a picture book. “Corn mash?”

“You’ll go blind, but you won’t feel a thing,” interjected Clarissa, laughing.

“Bite down on this rope.”

Their chuckles rose to a crescendo, then faded. Clarissa and I took seats on a long, lumpy sofa under Tom Harris’s picture window, which looked through warped glass panes—some rose-and some goldtinctured, bound in soldered iron—onto a tangle of bush, then down the sloping meadow.

We sat there. I assumed they were waiting for me to start my chores, but were too embarrassed to put me to work.

“Did you,” I hesitated, “did you want me to start with this hedge?”

I pointed out the window.

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This gave rise to another round of snorts and jibing:
Yes, is that
where you wanted him to start, Tom? He won’t need shears, he’ll need an
axe.
But again the teasing faded, and I quickly found myself sitting in an unlit room under the weak glow of daylight, waiting for three adults to speak. The cheer now felt brittle and forced, a thin cover for nervousness. I wasn’t used to this in grown-ups.

“Tom is joking,” said Clarissa at last—the only one of them, I recognized, who had children, and who might be inclined to understand my bewilderment. “You’re not really expected to clean up.”

“Apparently no one is,” muttered Uncle Freddie.

I blinked at Tom Harris in relief. I had spotted fierce-looking thorns in the bracken outside.

“Okay,” I said, not sure what
was
expected of me.

“Rather, as I understa-and it,” continued Clarissa in her odd, tremulous voice, “you’re going to help
us
work.”

“We’ll help each other,” offered Tom Harris. “I wasn’t fair in the hospital. I asked you questions, made promises, but explained nothing. Today, we’ll explain. I told Freddie and Clarissa what we discussed. Between the three of us, we have some expertise in these matters. Very few know that Clarissa, in addition to being a psychologist . . .”

“Tom,” she scolded.

“. . . is an ordained deacon, from a previous life. I am a medievalist. And I have a good knowledge of the mystical canon, thanks mainly to your father. Freddie, in addition to being a scholar, is your godfather, with an interest in your immortal soul.” Here I might have expected Tom Harris to smile wryly, but he did not. “A long way of saying, we’re not complete cranks. And we want to help you.”

“The doctors are helping me already,” I said, glumly. “I’m seeing a therapist. A lady’s giving me tests. I have my medication. And I have a checkup in Charlottesville in two weeks.”

“The doctors know some things,” said Tom Harris. “We know others.”

“You know about my father,” I guessed.